Globe Education Online

Henry IV, Part 1 (2010)

Professor Russ McDonald (Goldsmiths, University of London) provides a brief introduction to Henry IV Part 2, the shift in tone from the first part, and why the idea of a 'history play' might be more slippery than we think.

Time: 18mins 24secs

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Transcript of podcast

Ryan Nelson:

Hello, I’m Ryan Nelson and these are the Globe Education podcasts. This is an informal conversation with Professor Russ Macdonald, who is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the winner of multiple teaching awards, including the North Carolina Professor of the Year, awarded by the Carnegie Foundation in 2003. His publications are mainly devoted to Shakespeare, especially to questions of poetry and style, and some of these include Shakespeare and the Art of Language, and Shakespeare’s Late Style. His Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, published in 1996 and then in a second edition in 2001, is widely adopted in university courses here and abroad. He also writes as a reviewer for Opera magazine, and this year he was elected President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

So bringing that to bear then on the play of Henry IV Part 2, from the title it sets itself up as a sequel, and I’m interested to from the outset really whether it’s a play that can helpfully be treated on its own or whether it needs the influence of what’s gone before?

Russ McDonald:

I think it can easily stand on its own, although audiences often don’t think so in advance. I think the irony is that, as great a play as 1 Henry IV, I think this is an even greater work, that once you immerse yourself in it, it just becomes infinitely rewarding and very disturbing and complex. It’s my favourite of all the Shakespeare history plays, I have to say.

None of that, none what I have said addresses the question of how it got written! We don’t know whether Shakespeare imagined a cycle of plays; he had written one cycle before, the first four history plays, starting with 1 Henry VI and ending with Richard III, which constitute what we call the first tetralogy. They really do form a kind of group, and having written those, he could have thought as early as Richard II that he would develop a series of plays about the fall of Richard II and its consequences with the coronation of Henry IV, and then his decline and death and then the success of Prince Hal. So we just don’t know. I like to imagine, actually, a kind of meeting in the backstage area at The Theatre in Shoreditch (they weren’t playing at the Globe at this point, this is 1597 or 1598). Clearly they have a hit on their hands with 1 Henry IV, the character of Falstaff is beginning to make the mark that he’s going to make over the next few centuries, so I sort of imagine them as a group of Hollywood producers and actors and writers thinking “Well, you know, Jaws was such a success and made so much money that we have to do it again – we have to do another one!”

Elizabethan audiences knew two things about Prince Hal: one, he became a great king, and partly he became a great king because he died early, that is, he wins the battle of Agincourt as an underdog. But they also knew about his prodigal youth, so 1 Henry IV is about his prodigal youth. Whether Shakespeare intended, as he started writing 1 Henry IV, to go on through to Hal’s ascent to the throne in that first play, that’s possible. It may be that midway through that play he began to decide that there was simply too much material and that he could divide it into two plays. Those are several scenarios that might have occurred. So the answer is we don’t know, but as I said the irony is that this is a terrific play.

RN:

Tonally, most critics would seem to acknowledge that there’s quite a shift in moving from Part 1 into Part 2, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where that comes from and how it demonstrates itself.

RM:

Oh, certainly: because 1 Henry IV is about young people, and 2 Henry IV is about old people. And I often tell my students that they’re not old enough to read this play, they have to read it for my course but they really have to come back and read it in about 25 years. In 1 Henry IV we get the “gallant youth” Hotspur and we get the young Prince Hal, who is going to challenge or who finally comes to accept his duty. The king at this point is vigorous and leads the forces at the battle of Shrewsbury.

But by the time we get to Part 2 it’s a matter of decline. Everybody’s sick: we start with Northumberland, or as Rumour says, he’s going to take us to the castle where “old Northumberland / Lies crafty-sick”. So is he really sick, or is he not sick, he didn’t show up at the end of Part 1, he and his men were supposed to show up and help the rebels and he didn’t appear. ‘Where he lies crafty sick’: is he sick, or is he faking it? Rumour tells us that he’s “crafty-sick”, but then Rumour’s come onto the stage and said “I’m a liar”. So that sets up from the very beginning the sort of instability of language, which we can go on to talk about in a minute.

After that you get the King, who is ill throughout the play. His first appearance, he talks about how he can’t sleep; later in the play he talks about how uncomfortable he is, how ill he is, even the news of John’s victory at Gaultree Forest, he can’t enjoy because he’s too sick. Falstaff, his entrance is about a urine sample: he says to the Page boy “What says the doctor to my water?” The other great, great sections devoted to age is the two scenes in Gloucestershire with Justice Shallow and Justice Silence, who mainly just talk about how old they are and how everybody’s dead. And then, even Prince Hal’s first line is “Before God, I am exceeding weary”.

It’s all about the failure of the body, about the decline in expectations, about disappointment. Everybody’s exhausted, and that sense of lateness, of things being over with, of decline, decay and decrepitude, all those things, just saturate the language of this play in every single scene. The point of course, which the Archbishop of York makes, when asked “Why are you leading this rebellion?” he says, “Because our land is sick”. And so it’s a kind of national problem then which is dispersed then into these various old, failing figures.

RN:

One of the ways that possibly then appears somewhat problematically for a lot of audiences is then in Hal’s ultimate rejection of Falstaff, and, not to put words in your mouth, but is that almost then a requirement to heal himself and the nation, or how do you read that scene?

RM:

Well, the first thing to say is that the audience knows it from the start, or at least the Elizabethan audience knows it from the start, I’m not sure a modern audience, unacquainted with British history is going to be as constantly conscious of what’s going to happen at the end of the play, but the Elizabethan audience knew that Hal would become the king, and that Falstaff is going down.

One reason that 2 Henry IV’s a great play is because Shakespeare has just reached, I think, his real maturity as a writer. And one of the things that makes Shakespeare a great writer is his ability to see both sides of an issue. Helen Vendler, the Professor of English at Harvard, in her great book on the Sonnets [The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Harvard, 1997] says “Shakespeare’s mind was organised antithetically” – he could not think of a thing without thinking of something that was different from it, specifically something that was opposite to it. And what is so interesting about that is that you can see over the course of from 1593/4, I mean, Richard III – we know how to think about Richard III – he’s a monster, he’s got to be killed at Bosworth Field etc, and yet there’s also that incredibly stagy charm about Richard III. So even there you see hints of it, but here – everything that you say about a character, you have to say “… and yet”. Because there is a subversion of every point that’s made; everything that we like about Falstaff is also part of the problem with Falstaff. And so the rejection of Falstaff is absolutely necessary for Hal’s successful assumption of power, and his proper management of the requirements of leadership, and yet the cost of that to us – he’s gone, he’s finished. And yet (you’ve got to say “and yet” about “and yet”!) Because Falstaff is become a kind of cliché throughout Part 2 – all his jokes are old, he knows all his jokes are old, he keep winking at the audience and he’s sort of embarrassed at the sort of tiredness of his own style. And yet, you can go beyond that.

So yes, it is a necessary part of government, and yet the sacrifice that you make is that what you get is you get bureaucrats, you get people without humour, you get people who can’t see two meanings to a word, etcetera, etcetera.

RN:

I think that’s a great place to move onto the next point. I mean one of the other play’s we’re doing this season is Henry VIII, which is also known as All Is True, which I sometimes just wonder, if that’s another way of just saying “nothing is true”?

RM:

Exactly, exactly so.

RN:

And you’ve already mentioned that sense of double words and double playing and antitheses really, and I’m wondering how that language then impacts upon the sense that this is a 'history' play.

RM:

Yeah, let’s talk about that a little more. Double talk, for example – there are so many instances in this play of puns, to start with. Falstaff works by means of the pun, and the pun is simple a double meaning, a single linguistic sign with at least two possible meanings to it. It’s a form of creativity in Falstaff. His recreation is the recreation of the world by means of language, by creating two things out of one thing. When the Lord Chief Justice says “Your waste is great”, he says “I would it were otherwise; I would my waist were slenderer and my means were great”. So, it’s a turn, it’s a trope, it’s a game – it is for Falstaff a kind of artistic act. It’s small, but it happens over and over again, and it’s a kind of form of vivacity; it really is a defence against death, in Falstaff’s manner. That’s one reason that he’s so attractive, that there’s this consciousness of his own limitations and yet he’s attempt to overcome those by means of his sort of joyful play of language.

But there are so many other kinds of double talk, and verbal creativity in the play. For example: Shallow. Shallow can’t say anything once. When he comes on with Silence: “Come on, come on, come on sir” (3.2.1) When he’s instructing Davy to do the work around “Davy, Davy, Davy, Davy, let me see, Davy; let me see Davy” he repeats himself over and over again. Also, he’s repeating the past, because he constantly talks about when he was young, and when he and Falstaff were hellraisers at Clements Inn. And so on, so there’s a kind of ‘doubleness’ there as he thinks about the past.

There are other arcane or esoteric or complicated forms of doubleness. Pistol, for example, is a total linguistic counterfeit, in that he’s a Marlowe character, or he thinks he’s Marlowe character, so he delivers these elaborate, pompous, heroic speeches, and he’s a complete coward. My favourite line is when Doll Tearsheet gets in a fight with Pistol and the hostess says “No, Good Captain Pistol; not here, sweet captain”, and Doll says:

Captain! thou abominable damned cheater, art thou
not ashamed to be called captain? An captains were
of my mind, they would truncheon you out, for
taking their names upon you before you have earned
them. You a captain! you slave, for what? for
tearing a poor whore's ruff in a bawdy-house?

I mean, that’s the only action that Pistol has ever seen, is a fight with a girl! And so, what you call things, what you name things is something that comes up constantly in the play.

I have two other really favourite examples, and they’re connected. One is when Bardolph comes in to the scene in Gloucestershire, and he’s announcing Falstaff’s arrival, and Shallow says “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” “Well, I’m here for Falstaff”, and Shallow says “Well, okay. May I ask how my lady his wife does?”

Bardolph:
Sir, pardon; a soldier is better accommodated than
with a wife.

Shallow:
It is well said, in faith, sir; and it is well said
indeed too. Better accommodated!

And he goes on and on about “accommodated”, “It comes of accommodo” and so forth. That word has to do with dressing, and putting on something, accommodating. And therefore, when we get to the scene at Gaultree forest, when Prince John says ‘I will redress your grievances, and these redresses you will be pleased with’, and then they begin to sound the word of peace, and we will lie together tonight, and then Prince John says “Arrest them all”. It’s a lie; it’s a dressing up of the truth. It’s a pun essentially to say that I will ‘re-dress’ these grievances and we shall lie together tonight, it’s a lie. So all of those things lead us to question whether the word we use is reliable, whether it’s not deceptive, whether it’s meaningful, and whether it has other meanings that people can manipulate.

Which leads then to the problem of writing history. Shakespeare has now written (what we call history plays is partly a problem), but he has written now about seven history plays, and what it seems to me he is especially concerned with in 2 Henry IV is the problem of history. If these linguistic signs are unreliable, if what people say is subject to manipulation and deception, then [Edward] Hall and [Raphael] Holinshed and Polydore Vergil and all the historians that Shakespeare is reading, how do we know that they’re reliable? They’re relying on each other, and their representations of history are very much dependent on the time in which they lived. I mean, [Thomas] More’s life of Henry VII, for example, is just a slam at Richard III, and even now, there’s the Richard III society that argues that Richard was maligned, etc, so it’s impossible to tell exactly what happened.

The great example of that in the play is the scene with Shallow and Falstaff, and Shallow says “Do you remember when we used to go drinking, and when we would chase girls?” and so on, and he talks about someone he knew and how John of Gaunt, like the sky, and so on, and that’s all lovely and we’re thinking about these two old geezers as really, really charming and so forth. And so at the very end of that scene, everybody goes off except Falstaff who comes forward and says “This guy, he talks about John of Gaunt – every third word a lie!” Well, is it? Or is Falstaff misrepresenting Shallow? Well, we don’t know, it’s a play; there is no omniscient narrator, there’s no objective truth. I mean, we know what the historical record is, but the historical record is itself subject to all of these contingencies.

RN:

So all you are left with then I guess is that figure of Rumour in some ways overshadowing the play, and it emerging from that.

RM:

Absolutely, exactly so.

RN:

I think that’s a brilliant introduction to it, thank you very much for your time today.

RM:

Oh, you’re very welcome, thank you.